Posts by Louis Reed

Quote from Eric Walker

Not sure I fully understand your complaint, but there are several such claims, e.g., as made in this 1987 patent by William Barker:

This choice of an example kind of makes the point. It’s not LENR. There are no nuclear reactions claimed. The blue sky claims of waste remediation I referred to involve transmutation to more stable isotopes, which could be demonstrated by putting a radioactive sample in a LENR device, and taking out a less radioactive sample.

As for the patent, well sometimes patents are granted for claims that have not been realized, and considering that this idea has not been widely implemented and has not resulted in fame and glory for the inventor, it’s a safe bet this is one of those patents. I don’t know if one should take seriously an inventor who thinks 2 of the 3 most important isotopes in nuclear waste are U-238 and U-235. U-238 is not particularly radioactive, but in any case, neither isotope is actually made in the reactor. U-238 was there (in nature) to begin with, and U-235 is *depleted*. Not that that diminishes the importance of affecting alpha-decay with small electric fields — if it were possible — but it says something about the inventor’s competence in the field, in addition to the point made by HGB.

“I vaguely recall claims to change activity among LENR researchers, e.g. George Miley. The question for me is whether there is any reproducible "lab rat" experiment to be found among or derived from such experiments.”

Your recollections are vague, because the claims are vague. Reducing the activity of a radioactive sample would not be a vague claim. But yes, I’m referring to claims that other qualified scientists can verify.

“This would surely be interesting, but possibly inconsistent with whatever mechanism might be at play assuming a subset of LENR results are real.”

Ah yes, nature contrives to make any unambiguous indication of LENR inconsistent with whatever mechanism might be at play. That’s why levels of tritium or neutrons or gamma rays commensurate with excess heat are never seen. Nature also seemed to foil every attempt to determine the rest frame of the ether, until Einstein came along and declared it superfluous.

Quote from Eric Walker

I agree that if there were neutron capture, "dineutron" capture, proton capture or detueron capture, the products would generally be unstable. The first thing I do when reading a LENR paper is to ignore or forget whatever suggested explanation is provided and just focus on the experimental section.

The experimental sections claim transmutations from the existing elements that correspond to captures, and could not be explained by fission. So the absence of unstable nuclides remains a valid objection.

“Because fission in general is a synonym for actinide fission, the parents are so heavy that the daughters lie far from the line of stability.”

If fission is to be exothermic, then there has to be an excess of neutrons (not counting alpha decay as fission). The increase in binding energy per nucleon resulting from fission is because of the long-range repulsive Coulomb force is compensated by additional neutrons as the size increases beyond mid-size.

“There are multiple claims of short-lived radiation (e.g., half-lives of hours). This would be expected of very light fission daughters if fission of a medium mass nucleus could be engineered.”

Again, fission of a medium mass would not be exothermic (not considering alpha decay as fission). And the unstable products are not necessarily short-lived. Ni-64 to two Si-28 (half-life 153 years). Ni-58 to Al-26 (700,000 years) and P-32 (14 days). In any case, radiation associated with such unstable nuclides (even short-lived) would be highly specific identifying the nuclide unambiguously. I have not seen such claims. Claims of radiation in cold fusion experiments are usually vague, non-repeatable, and unidentifiable: tracks or elevated count rate in a GM tube. The one gamma energy reported by Piantelli of a lone 661 keV peak happens to correspond to Cs-137, a common calibrant found in many physics labs.

Quote from Eric Walker

This is assuming something like neutron addition. If the process is akin to spontaneous fission, stable and very short-lived radionuclides might be expected.

Many of the claimed transmutations are from neutron or "dineutron" or proton capture, sometimes several steps with unstable intermediates. And fission usually produces unstable products because of excess neutrons. Stable products are characteristic of very long time periods for the unstables to decay. Immediate products of most reactions involve unstable products in general. And since they claim dozens of transmutation products, it is not plausible that not one would be sufficiently unstable to generate measurable radiation.

The SPAWAR group is claiming to be able to induce fission and to stabilize radioactive waste. Well, instead of making such claims based on supposed evidence of stable starting and ending points, or disputed evidence of neutrons, why doesn't someone somewhere take a radioactive source and demonstrate that they can reduce the activity? Or take a stable sample, and demonstrate they can increase the activity? *That* kind of transmutation could be detected at far far lower levels, and the measurements would be far more specific than mass spectrometry of stable atoms.

In spite of all the blue sky talk of waste remediation, I am not aware of a single claim where they have been able to change the activity of any sample up or down. Or for that matter, produced a stable nuclide not abundantly present in nature.

Updating one's interpretation based on new evidence should come as easily as breathing for anyone serious about science. Changing one's beliefs based on how emphatic or non-subtle the latest prophets are, especially *without* good evidence, should be avoided by anyone serious about science. Rossi demonstrates that in spades.

Quote from Shane D.

They are very emphatic about what they are seeing also. Nothing subtle at all about their comments.

Yea, all the Rossi supporters were very emphatic and non-subtle about the ecat too. Some still are. And yet you seem to have abandoned Rossi.

Quote from Shane D.

LR,

Curious what you and your colleagues think about all the transmutations being reported? Nothing new as they have been observed for 100 years, but it seems nowadays, whoever looks specifically, finds them; India, Japanese, Russians, Safire.

Contaminants are easy to find when you look.

It is a remarkable coincidence that of the new nuclides observed, they are all stable, and present in nature with very similar isotopic ratios.

Of the more than 3000 nuclides that have been experimentally characterized, only 253 are stable, so the production of unstable products in nuclear reactions (especially involving larger nuclides) is overwhelmingly favored, and in many of the claimed reactions, are necessary intermediates. Plus, the sensitivity and specificity for unstable nuclei is a million times better. Yet they only claim stable, naturally occurring nuclides. Contamination is the only statistically plausible explanation.

Quote from Shane D.

LR,

You are nit-picking. This is just a legal formality that in no way diminishes the significance of this partnership.

NASA has been involved in various capacities with LENR since the beginning, probably peaking with the Bushnell and Zawodny tag-team. Never led to anything significant before, so there is not much significance to diminish.

"GEC is a legitimate company, and NASA is one of the finest, and most respected institutions in the world."

GEC claimed to have a deal to sell working power reactors to Guam (was it?). If they're legit, then why would they go from selling working power reactors to validating a tiny reactor many years later? Their web site, when it existed, did not suggest legitimacy to me.

NASA is fine and respected, yes, but they are huge, and huge companies can't help but hire a few crack-pots. Which is why they have investigated anti-gravity and cold fusion.

Quote from Alan Smith

Tom Claytor, who is working with these guys knows as much about particle detection as anybody on the planet. If he signed off on this, you can bet he has analysed it 6 ways from Sundays

Claytor spent a decade chasing tritium in cold fusion in the 90s, and in the early part, he was confident, but in the last report I found of that work in 1998, it's clear they hadn't answered any interesting questions about it, and hadn't gotten a single prestigious publication out of it. That 1998 paper explains that "due to the subtle and weak nature of the signals observed, we have taken many precautions and checks to prevent contamination and to confirm the tritium is not due to an artifact". And of course the tritium claims have led to nothing, so I wouldn't put much weight on him signing off on anything.

Quote from Zeus46

Other than the excess heat, tritium, X-rays, and gamma rays, of course.

None are credible or (importantly) commensurate.

"Wouldn’t a nuclear reactor help out by producing it’s own additional neutrons, chain reaction style?"

If they were relying on chain reactions in U-235 e.g., they wouldn't need LENR.

The idea is that fast neutrons can cause fission of the much more abundant U-238 (or even Th-232). However, unlike U-235, U-238 and Th-232 do not sustain chain reactions.

Quote from Shane D.

I believe this is what it is all about:

https://patentscope.wipo.int/s…tring=&tab=PCTDescription

[011] Recently, Boss (Boss, et al, "Triple Tracks in CR-39 as the result of Pd-D Co-deposition: evidence of energetic neutrons", Naturwissenschaften, (2009) VoI 96:135-142) documented the production of deuterium-deuterium (2.45 MeV) and deuterium-tritium (14.1 MeV) fusion neutrons using palladium co-deposition on non-hydriding metals. These energetic neutrons were observed and spectrally resolved using solid state detectors identical to those routinely used in the ICF (DoE lnertial Confinement Fusion program) experiments....

The problem with this is that the neutron flux claimed by the patent and the 2009 paper referenced above is orders of magnitude too low to make a useful fusion-fission reactor. They have admitted this, and that the reactor proposal assumes the neutron flux can be scaled up somehow. The papers they are presenting at ICCF just seem to claim some neutrons; there is no indication that they have succeeded in increasing the flux.

If the claimed neutrons were real, the flux probably could be scaled up, but if they're not, obviously it can't be. A few years ago Faccini et al. set an upper limit of neutron production 100 times *below* what was claimed in the SPAWAR patent, so it's probably not real.

Anyway, if it were real, and if they could scale up the neutron production, *that's* what they would claim first. If they could use the neutrons to cause fission of a small sample of U-238, (or to remediate a tiny sample of nuclear waste, which they also claim) that would be extremely easy to prove (and very difficult to fake), and by itself would rocket them to fame overnight. Instead, as is typical in this "field", they talk about blue sky reactors without laying the necessary groundwork. I begin to suspect the scientists exiled from SPAWAR are playing Rossi's game.

Also, it should be noted that NASA is pretty careful in this agreement to insist that the agreement does *not* constitute endorsement from NASA. They, after all, do participate in some pretty far out ideas, like anti-gravity.

In spite of the confidence expressed over on ECW, I'm all but certain that this too shall pass.

Quote from Director

To be clear here, the official conclusion of the AATIP (not some crackpot UFO organization but an actual Department of Defense program ran at the Pentagon) is that this vehicle, along with several others, represents an extremely advanced technology beyond anything known to be possessed in the arsenal of the United States or any other nation. This isn't conjecture, speculation, or some guess.

I'm confused. Doesn't the Department of Defense and the Pentagon represent a component of the "Powers That Be"? Here you're taking the word of the Powers That Be as infallible -- not subject to legitimate challenge.

But elsewhere, you dismiss the Powers That Be when they discount the reality of UFOs: "It's flabbergasting how superb of a job the powers that be have done to keep the UFO topic seemingly taboo."

So the Powers That Be both prove UFOs are real and successfully convince most of the public that they're not.

It seems like in your eyes, the credibility of a source depends on whether or not they promote what you have decided to believe.

Quote from THHuxleynew

For all his acknowledged bias, and (believed by some here) poor judgement, Alan is at least rational. So that makes his anecdotal comments more relevant than Bob Greenyer's. And personally I have every confidence that he would not falsely deceive us.

I don't know who wrote the "LENR is real" claim above, but I suspect it wasn't Alan, given the caution he displays when he says only "something remarkable happened here". My post was directed at the confident declaration, not the cautious observation.

Quote from Director

The Age of the EVO has began.

Two years ago we had a very incomplete picture of LENR

Not according to Greenyer -- the claimant at the time -- who said in March 2016:

"I will explain all and you will see why I am so certain."

If this all comes to naught over the next few months, as I expect it will, some time in the future, there will be another claim of definitive proof -- "this time for real" -- and then the present claim will be dismissed because it was incomplete, don't ya know...

Quote from Rends

LENR is REAL - LION2 was a 100% Replication, and it went well beyond LION1

Hmmm, sounds familiar. Where have I heard it before? Oh, I remember. Two years ago (Feb 2016), Bob Greenyer declared:

"the end of the carbon age"

and said:

"We did it... We lit the New Fire Together!"

Of course, the carbon age did not end, but, seven months later (September 2016) Greenyer said:

"I have devised an absolutely fool proof experiment that will prove inside 2 weeks the reality of LENR indisputably and live and will not need a replication, post verification or any complicated debates to convince doubters. Moreover it will have implications across many scientific disciplines."

Well, 2 weeks -- 2 years -- 2 decades, it's all the same, isn't it?

Quote from Zephir_AWT

Nope, I don't capiche. The burden of proof should be on accuser, not his victim, after then. Not to say, the accusations of fraud always make permanent damage, even if they turn out to be completely unsubstantial. So that the accuser should keep his responsibility for such damage and to pay, once he cannot prove his point.

The burden of proof *is* on the accuser.

So, if Rossi accuses someone of libel in the form of a law suit, the burden to prove libel to the court is Rossi's. And that will require him to prove the accusation is a lie to the satisfaction of the court.

Likewise, if someone accuses Rossi of fraud in the form of a legal charge in court, then the charge of fraud must be proven to the court's satisfaction.

If you call someone a thief in the street because you think he picked your pocket, you do not have to prove your accusation to avoid a law suit -- you have to prove it to get him convicted in court (or you have to justify it to have it believed by the public). Likewise, the alleged thief does not have to prove innocence to avoid a charge, but he does to sue his accuser for libel.

Quote from sifferkoll

It might be a defence, but it is certainly not enough. Calling someone a child molester and/or fraudster might be libel even of it turns out you are correct

Yes, it is enough. To sue someone for libel, you must prove the statement in question is not true.

Quote from sifferkoll

That is not the way it work is it Mary? It is hardly Rossis or anybodies task to prove themselves innocent of your accusations. Most legal systems are supposed to work the other way around for good reasons.

You are confused. An accusation in an internet forum is not a legal charge, and you are right that one does not have to prove oneself innocent of such accusations to prevent legal action.

This applies to an accusation of libel as well: if one is accused of libel in an internet forum, it is not necessary to prove oneself innocent of libel to avoid legal action.

But when someone is legally charged, then the charge must be proven. That's the principle of innocent-until-proven-guilty. And this also applies to accusations of libel, which happen in civil court. But for a libel suit to succeed, the accuser must prove libel, and that means proving the accused has lied, which may entail proving oneself innocent of the allegedly libelous statement.

As already quoted: "It is a tort (civil wrong) making the person or entity (like a newspaper, magazine or political organization) open to a lawsuit for damages by the person who can prove the statement about him/her was a lie."

So, yes, if Rossi were to sue someone for libel for calling him a fraud, he would have to prove he is not a fraud. It is exactly consistent with innocent-until-proven-guilty.

Capiche?

Quote from [email protected]

LENR is the only science subjected to such high and exacting standards.

No, you have it upside down. The scientific mainstream bent over backwards to accommodate LENR.

Science and Nature were prepared to accept almost anything from P&F after their dramatic press conference, but they could not meet even the lowered standards, and ended up publishing a paper in J Electroanal. Chem. that was so sloppy, it needed several pages of corrections, and the withdrawal of a central claim in the paper. It took that journal a decade to realize their folly, and then they stopped publishing in the field too.

If it weren't for the huge upside to cold fusion, were it real, P&F probably couldn't have published in a respectable journal, or if they had, it would have been ignored, and soon forgotten.

There has not been any progress in the field to speak of, in spite of significant effort and spending. Even marginally credible claims have become more modest and far more scarce in the refereed literature. There is still no credible evidence for reaction products, no reliable recipe, and no observations that are not much more plausibly attributable to artifact, experimental error, and wishful thinking.

No self-respecting field of science would need a bunch of amateurs in the form of MFMP to come riding in to save them, only to end up 5 years later making the same lame, marginal claims that have characterized the field from the beginning.

Quote

Kevmo: If those standards were applied to High Temperature Superconductors we'd only be 2 degrees above absolute zero.

Oh please. The first claim was above 30 K, and soon after it was being demonstrated unequivocally in classrooms.

Quote

Kevmo: If it were applied to Dolly the sheep, all you guys would be calling for those clone claimants to be in jail.

Cloning has low statistical probability (like the probability an alpha is deflected 180 degrees by gold foil), but the statistics are reproducible, and the success is unequivocal. Not so for cold fusion.

Quote

Kevmo: And applying such standards to semiconductors would have pushed us back to the days where we could only fit a hundred onto a square inch.

All these fields easily met standard scientific standards that cold fusion has never met. Transistors were finicky, but when one worked, anyone could make it work, and the demonstration of amplification was unequivocal.

Maybe preparing the Pd or Ni is finicky, but when an electrode (or whatever) works, it should be similarly unequivocal. But there are no remotely credible experiments that generate enough power to power themselves. If there were, a demonstration would be undeniable.

Quote

Kevmo: When the top hundred electrochemists replicated the PF Anomalous Heat Event, it became established science but skeptopaths simply don't like it.

This makes no sense. Established science is recognized by the establishment. Cold fusion is not. And if you read up on the world's reaction to P&F in 1989, you will see that nearly everyone really *liked* it, when they thought it might be real. And what's not to like about cheap and clean and abundant energy? So, if what one likes influences one's belief, then the influence is strongly in cold fusion's favor.

It's far more plausible that believers believe cold fusion because they simply like it, than that skeptics are skeptical because they don't like it.

I wrote: Instead, the number of groups actively investigating cold fusion now is a small fraction of 180, which means most of those labs have abandoned the field, many without publishing, and for a phenomenon with the importance of cold fusion, that is inconceivable unless the scientists came to realize the effect was not real.No, the funding dried up and scientists moved on to other projects where they could get paid.

Quote from [email protected]

No, the funding dried up and scientists moved on to other projects where they could get paid.

Funding from respectable sources (like DOE) dried up because the claims did not withstand scrutiny. The claims did not fail to persuade the world because funding dried up.

Indeed, funding did not dry up. Storms estimates $500M has been spent on the field. P&F got something like $50M from Toyota, about 500 times what they claimed was needed to make the claim in the first place. EPRI funded McKubre, and governments in India, Italy, and Japan continued to fund cold fusion for a long time. Moreover, the incredible potential of cold fusion, were it real, has attracted private funding from the likes of Sidney Kimmel, and lately Bill Gates (allegedly), Karl Page, and Darden and co. The truth is, it is far easier to attract funds in cold fusion (or hydrinos) than in most fields considered legitimate in mainstream science. The likes of Godes, Dardik, Mills, and Rossi would have no chance with peer reviewed funding agencies, and all have attracted millions from private investment.

No, the statement stands: It is inconceivable that reputable institutes would abandon a field like cold fusion unless the scientists believed the likelihood that the phenomenon was real was vanishingly small.

I wrote: Surely, if this claim of 180 (or 90) reputable university labs having replicated cold fusion held water, there would have been no need for the formation of the MFMP whose first aim is to identify an experiment that can be replicated by university labs.

Quote

Kevmo: MFMP is aiming to identify an experiment that almost anyone can replicate, not just university labs.

According to their web site, their "goal is to facilitate the wide-spread replication and validation of New Fire experiments, such as Francesco Celani's, at reputable research institutions around the world."

So, I repeat, if 180 reputable institutes had replicated in a credible way, MFMP would be superfluous.

Quote

Kevmo: Because people like you don't think that the top hundred electrochemists in the world are acceptable.

I don't even know who the top 100 electrochemists are, but if you provide a list, and they all claim cold fusion is real, I'll consider it.

But you're probably right. I base my evaluation of the field on the quality of the published claims, and they fail to persuade.

But if I were to base my view of the field on authority, I would put more weight on the thousands of top nuclear physicists who are all but certain it's bunk, than on 100 unnamed electrochemists.

Quote from JedRothwell

That was a tally by Britz, not me. It was made in the mid to late 1980s.

What on earth are you talking about? You can't tally replications before the experiment being replicated has been performed.

I was referring to a paper dated 2009, entitled "Tally of Cold Fusion Papers", for which you (Jed Rothwell) are listed as the only author. Britz's database is one of the sources, but so is your lenr-canr database. In that paper, there is a topic "Positive, peer-reviewed excess heat papers culled from both databases", which is presumably a superset of refereed replications of P&F. The description says "The titles are culled from both [databases]", so it was you doing the tallying, not Britz, even if you used his database. And the complete list of 153 papers is given in an appendix, and it includes a paper by Arata in 2008, so it clearly post-dates Storms' table 2, published in 2004, which you claimed represents 180 "highly reputable university and government labs" that replicated P&F.

Furthermore, according to your own paper, the list of 153 refereed papers represents only 51 different affiliations, and not all of those are universities or government labs, since they include e.g. BlackLight Power, Toyota's IMRA, and Swartz's JET Energy.

Quote

Not all of the 180 institutions published papers in the peer-reviewed literature.

Yes, that's what I argued, and that's what doesn't make sense. A highly reputable university or government lab that claims replication of cold fusion would not be reputable if it didn't publish.

Quote

There were 180 institutions in Table 2. I counted them long ago.

You may have counted them, but I don't believe you got to 180:

1. There are only about 180 entries, and Miles accounts for 9 of them, Zhang and Arata another 9, Eagleton and Bush for 7. There are at least 7 other authors (or author groups) with 5 or more entries, and 28 others with 2 to 5. Now some entries may represent more than one affiliation, but there is no way to make up for the multiple entries from many institutions. This is obvious when you consider the following...

2. All but about 45 of the authors listed in Storms table are accounted for in your list of principal authors responsible for the excess heat papers you tallied. The overlap is probably even stronger since Storms lists first author (and 2nd if there are only 2), and not necessarily principal author. And your list corresponds to 51 affiliations. So, that means the remaining 45 authors would have to account for 129 additional affiliations.

So, it's clear from your own writing that 180 affiliations is not justifiable, let alone 180 highly reputable university and government institutions.

Such a cavalier misrepresentation of the contents of your own paper kind of destroys your credibility with respect to the rest of the cold fusion literature. Of course, in the Trump era, dishonesty seems to win a loyal following.

Quote from JedRothwell

1. Over 180 highly reputable universities and government labs replicated, as shown in Storms Table 2.

This sounds like a Trumpian exaggeration. Table 2 shows no such thing. There are over 180 entries in the table, but many are from the same authors at the same institutes. I didn't take the time to look up the institutes, but just from first (and some second) authors, there appear to be less than half that many *institutes* involved. I suspect further investigation would reveal considerably fewer institutes involved. And also that some are not highly reputable (Energetics e.g., which was neither a govt nor university lab).

It's not that 90 institutes isn't impressive, but if you feel the need to lie to support your case, one wonders if it's because you don't think the truth is good enough.

And you would know that 180 reputable institutes is not plausible, because the table was compiled in 2004, and in 2009 you tallied excess heat claims and came up with 153 papers in the refereed literature, which also contained multiple papers from some authors. That would mean many reputable govt or university labs replicated cold fusion and did not publish in a refereed journal, which is not plausible.

Furthermore, the list reflects claims of excess heat in metal hydrides, not strict "replications" of P&F, which would involve electrolysis of palladium in D2O. This list includes claims with excess heat in Ni with light hydrogen, and using methods other than electrolysis.

Finally, if true, decade-old claims of replications by 180 reputable labs would weaken the case for cold fusion to the breaking point. If the evidence they claimed were believed by trained scientists, there would be thousands of replications by now.

Instead, the number of groups actively investigating cold fusion now is a small fraction of 180, which means most of those labs have abandoned the field, many without publishing, and for a phenomenon with the importance of cold fusion, that is inconceivable unless the scientists came to realize the effect was not real.

And for 180 reputable labs investigating a phenomenon, it seems implausible that no significant progress has been made. There is no consistent and quantitative reproducibility, no controlled parameter with which the effect scales in any predictable way, no agreement on a conceivable reaction, and no good evidence for nuclear reaction products. The only thing the community agrees upon is a vague indication of excess heat. This situation is far and away most consistent with pathological science.

Surely, if this claim of 180 (or 90) reputable university labs having replicated cold fusion held water, there would have been no need for the formation of the MFMP whose first aim is to identify an experiment that can be replicated by university labs.